sickbay and an antigrav stretcher, cursing the whole way, tears of

frustration and fear in his voice.

It took time to get there, time to find the stretcher. Time to find Bothari on the ship's intercom and order him in a clipped fierce voice to report to sickbay with the medtech. Time to run back through the empty ship with the lift unit to the shuttle hatch corridor.

When Miles got there, the pilot officer had stopped breathing. His

face was as waxy as his hands, his lips purple-blue as his nails, and the dried blood looked like a smear of colored chalk, dark and opaque.

Frantic haste made Miles's fingers seem thick and clumsy as he

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fitted the unit around the mercenary—he refused to think of it as "the mercenary's body"—and floated him off the floor. Bothari arrived at sickbay as Miles was positioning the mercenary over an examining

table and releasing the lift unit.

"What's the matter with him, Sergeant?" asked Miles urgently.

Bothari glanced over the still form. "He's dead," he said flatly, and turned away.

"Not yet, damn it!" cried Miles. "We've got to be able to do something to revive him! Stimulants—heart massage—cryo-stasis—

did you find the medtech?"

"Yes, but she was too heavily stunned to rouse."

Miles swore again, and began ransacking drawers for recognizable

medications and equipment. They were disorganized, the labels on

the outside having, apparently, no relation to the contents.

"It won't do any good, my lord," said Bothari, watching him impassively. "You'd need a surgeon. Stroke."

Miles rocked back on his heels, at last understanding what he had

just seen. He pictured the implant wires, ripped through the man's

brain, sliding against the rubbery covering of a major artery, slicing a fine groove in the heart-stressed tubule. Then the weakness

propagated with every pulse until catastrophic failure filled the

tissues with the killing hemorrhage.

Did this little sickbay even have a cryogenic chamber? Miles

hastened around the room and into the next, searching. The freezing process would have to be started immediately, or brain death would

be too far advanced to be reversed—never mind that he had only the

vaguest idea of how patients were prepared for freezing, or how to

operate the device, or . . .

There it was! A portable, a gleaming metal chamber on a float

pallet looking faintly like some deep-sea probe. Miles's heart seemed to fill his throat. He approached it. Its power pack was empty, its gas canisters read fully discharged, and its control computer was laid

open like some crudely dissected biological specimen. Out of order.

Miles slammed his fists against its metal sides, once, leaned his

forehead against its coolness, and swore one last heartfelt sibilant. He then stood silent until his breathing steadied, and returned without haste to the other room.